Rants and raves

I started off today wanting to give a tutorial on simple tricks to make the English of non-primary speakers sound more authentic. You know, basic stuff like diction and articulation. Don't pronounce "Volkswagen" as "Wolksvagen," understand that "bed" and "bet" and "bid" and "bit" and "bad" and "bat" all sound very different, and don't randomly throw in interjections like "hè" or "eh" that are natural in one language but sound weird and completely out of place in another. All triggered by an observation that people from Denmark seem to speak excellent, albeit very distinct, non-native English, compared to the Dutch, who seem to wing it well but are sloppy. But that's for another time. Many people confuse fluent with native, first language with primary language, and accent with dialect, frequently under the illusion that there is such a thing as a standard or proper version of ...

I recently found myself in a seemingly endless back-and-forth with the state. As these things go, this case was mild. It was the DMV. But as it was happening, and as I kept finding new hurdles, I kept thinking  "I'm going to write about this when it's over. Not before it's over, because that might jinx it or make it worse. But afterwards."  So here goes. Disclaimer : I realize bitching about the DMV is well traveled territory. And everyone I actually talked with was nice, and reasonably competent (some more than others). And in defense of the DMV, it normally probably does not take seven months, countless back-and-forth documents, and more than half a dozen in-person visits to field offices to change the name on the registration of a car.  Let me digress. In Holland, where I lived as a kid, their equivalent of the DMV (CBR) is notorious for its brutality and inefficiency. It routinely takes months (if not years, as in my niece's case), and thousands of euros ...

I am a sucker for award shows. I like the Oscars, the Grammys, the VMAs, the Emmys, and so on. I even sacrificed watching football to watch the Emmys last night. Btw, don't get me started on why it's Emmys and Grammys and not Grammies and Emmies, because that just seems wrong, but that's what people call them and how they spell it. So I'll play along and pretend it doesn't make my neck hair stand up. The Emmys are to the Oscars what the Europa League is to the Champions League. If you don't know what either of those are, google it and admire my snarkiness. If you wonder if there are a lot of different Emmys, the answer is yes, there are. The Emmys will nominate pretty much anyone as long as they've made some sort of television-like media, including your local weather forecaster, the host of daytime or late-night talk shows, and a whole bunch of shows available only on the streamers you didn't pay for. This year, the Emmys even nominated a guy who's b...

I'm a Bayesian. Back when I was at the age when math was still worth arguing over, I believed in Bayesian reasoning unconditionally. I had numerous arguments about it (mostly with fellow travelers -- I was surrounded by a filter bubble avant la lettre which, appropriately, referred to itself as the Bayesian mafia). We revered and wholeheartedly agreed with our platoon leaders, found likeminded friends at other universities who did great work, and disdained heretics who advocated despicable methods that deviated from the axioms of probability and Bayes' rule in favor of some other (thereby ad-hoc and wrong) representation of uncertainty, or who didn't accept the subjectivist interpretation of said numbers between zero and one as the One and Only Way to Represent Uncertainty (there, I capitalized it, that makes it true). So it was strange to see the recent firestorm of news about the sinking of a super-yacht named Bayesian  off the coast of Sicily. It felt almost personal. O...

So over the years, I have occasionally shown interest in how various family members connect to one another, but generally my occasional interest was limited to an isolated conversation with my parents, or maybe, during an especially energetic phase, emailing with a few relatives who were known to know about these things, maybe writing down a few things, and hearing a story or two. I knew my family on both sides had been mapped out pretty extensively (the advantage of them mostly having roots in the same country), but I had never caught the proverbial genealogy bug. Until now. Consider this fair warning: if you are a virgo, or you have a latent hunter-gatherer / collector / lego builder / librarian-archivist / list-maker / Candy Crush or Pokemon player or some similar OCD predisposition, genealogy can become an all-consuming thing. Before you know it, you spend hours digging to find the wedding date and location of some long-dead person you had never heard of until today, or you end u...

In my family, you have a dog. Except for my sister, who has a cat, probably for the same reason I didn't have a dog before. Give her time. So I have a dog. It was only a matter of time (and yes, I was an extreme late bloomer).  My dog is not one of those modern breeds sensitive to inbreeding, I suppose. She is of unplanned origins (it's one of those "oh shit my dog is pregnant, you're getting one of the puppies" things). Nothing designer about her, and although the dog equivalent of 23andme had a field day on her littermate and came up with a long list of ingredients, there is nothing labra nor doodle in her. Pretty much everything else, though. Quite a bit of German shepherd, and something with short legs. And something black, even though neither of her parents was. My dog was born "off the grid" in the mountains, in a similarly laissez-faire way as how she was conceived: her birth was discovered one freezing December morning as "oh wow the puppies...